the Chinese must have requested the new Benjamin as they buy a lot of these :).

the more i hear about how much Asia relys on US cash to run their economies (everyone knows what stuff costs when its all priced in US dollars), the more i think the dollar crashing conspiracies are bunk in short term. Vodpod videos no longer available.

excerpt: ”
To sum up, the Fed creates a monetary base and the banks can create $10 for every $1 of monetary base. Wall Street firms created $20 for every Fed $1. In other words, the Fed only seeds the market. Beyond crude instruments like interest-rate policy, it has little control over how much actual money supply exists. In good times banks lend too much. And in bad times, such as today, they don’t create enough money because they lend too little.

Perhaps the lesson Mr. Bernanke drew from 2008-09 is not that we need more regulation but that financial firms should not be allowed to generate money out of thin air to write soon-to-be-bad loans. To seal his legacy, it is fractional reserve banking that he can rein in. Limit leverage and you take away the hot air from these bubbles.”

2 years ago these articles were only on fringe ‘tin foil hat’ websites…now their on wsj every week…

excerpt:

“The nets came down on Wall Street, too. As the idea took hold that the Fed could meet any serious crisis by carpeting the nation with dollar bills, bankers and brokers took more risks. New forms of business organization encouraged more borrowing. New inflationary vistas opened.”